The formative role of teaching presence in blended Virtual Exchange

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a three-cycle action research study (Nunan & Bailey, 2009) that investigated the role of teaching presence (TP) in nurturing a Community of Inquiry (CoI) in a teacher training virtual exchange delivered in blended format. The study covers three iterations of such an exchange between three different cohorts of Polish and German EFL student teachers working on international teams to design technology-based intercultural tasks for their future educational contexts. Furthermore, we focus on the impact of TP on students’ self- and co-regulatory learning accounted for in the newly emergent concept of learning presence (LP). Qualitative analysis of various data sets from the three research cycles reveals that students’ LP, and with that their “transformation of participation” (Rogoff, 1994), is nurtured if instructors engage in various pedagogical interventions on the levels of design, discourse and instruction (Garrison, 2006). We identify the various types of such interventions and link them to different virtual exchange project phases. We also highlight the modelling role of TP in blended formats in the context of a teacher training virtual exchange. Modelling, delivered through such interventions, can be formative for future teachers’ professional competence.